Innovation Overground with Joe Runge, Tyler Scherr and Charlie Litton

Hello and welcome! In this episode, Lisa speaks with Joe Runge, Tyler Scherr, and Charlie Litton, hosts of the very informative and funny podcast, Innovation Overground. For those of you who are not familiar with the podcast, it was created to help promote academic innovation and the Technology Transfer and Commercialization efforts at the University of Nebraska and beyond. The podcast examines what it takes to advance academic inventions and discoveries beyond the research bench and into people’s lives as “actual things on a shelf.” 

Joe is the business development manager at the University of Nebraska Medical School, also known as UNeMed. He works with inventors, entrepreneurs, and developers to advance early stage technology toward the market. Tyler is a licensing associate at UNeMed, working with university inventors to protect and market their intellectual property. Charlie is the marketing and web content specialist at UNeMed, working with licensing staff to promote and publicize University innovations.

Listen as Joe, Tyler, and Charlie share their backgrounds and the journey to UNeMed. They share what UNeMed is, what they do, why they started the podcast, and what they wanted to accomplish. They talk about the music they use in the intro and how they came up with the name Innovation Overground.

Lisa and the guys discuss their favorite episodes of the podcast and talk about each of their roles. They speak about the recent boom in invention disclosures and share their reasons as to what is causing it. With the pandemic, it has been hard to nail down some new topics, but Lisa shares some ideas with them, and they chat about potential future episodes.

Their goal with the podcast is to do market-friendly bites promoting technologies, mix in a little humor, and make a podcast interesting and fun to listen to. Enjoy!

In This Episode:

• [03:31] Welcome to the show, Joe, Tyler, and Charlie!
• [03:42] Joe shares how he got into tech transfer and the position at UNeMed.
• [04:53] Tyler shares his journey to UNeMed.
• [05:57] Charlie started in journalism and shares what inspired him to take a position at UNeMed.
• [07:24] Can you guys tell us a little about what UNeMed is and what it does?
• [07:55] Listen as Joe discusses how and why they created the podcast.
• [10:51] They wanted to do very market-friendly bites promoting technologies.
• [12:45] What’s the story behind the name?
• [14:35] They speak about their intro music and where they found it.
• [16:54] Charlie says that he is the word monkey, Joe is Dr. Law dog, and Tyler is the science wizard.
• [17:58] What are your favorite episodes?
• [18:59] Joe and Tyler do a lot of the research, and Charlie helps to figure out what the hook for each episode will be.
• [21:13] UNeMed had their most prolific submissions for inventions in the last two quarters, almost 50 new inventions.
• [22:03] Listen as Joe speaks about what he thinks is pushing the invention boom.
• [24:23] Can you give us a sneak peek into some of your future episodes?
• [26:40] How can people reach you guys if they have questions?
• [29:13] Thank you for being on the show!

Innovation Overground Episodes Mentioned:

• Ethical Eagle Burger Episode 207
• Getting Off This Rock Episode 225
• Sand Episode 230
• Covid Episodes 242, 243, 244

Find:

• Innovation Overground